Strategy Page has an interesting article about the recruiting problems facing Britain’s elite Special Air Service as the regular army slims down:
The SAS has to recruit and train 20 or more new commandos a year just to maintain its current strength. Several thousand British troops apply to join the SAS each year, but the SAS is very selective in who it takes. Some SAS members felt that expanding to 480 troops would dilute the quality. This is not necessarily so, but the debate over the issue continues within the SAS. Another ongoing dispute has to do with how the SAS is sometimes used. There have been several actions in the last decade where an entire Sabre Squadron was used in one action. As one SAS officer observed, an infantry company would have been more suitable for these operations. But other SAS officers believe that only SAS men could have gotten to scene of the action and launched these attacks in time. Regular infantry may have been able to do the fighting effectively, but the SAS are the best trained force for getting to difficult locations, scouting them out adequately and then quickly coming up with an effective attack plan.
[. . .]
In peacetime, most SAS missions are at the request of the Foreign Ministry, and are usually to solve some problem overseas that does not require a lot of muscle, but must be done quietly. In these situations, the SAS will spend a lot of their time operating as spies, even though all they are doing is reconnaissance for some mission. In peacetime, the SAS rarely operates in groups of more than a dozen men. But the war in Afghanistan found British military planners realizing that the troops that could be moved to that isolated country most quickly were the SAS. For a while in Afghanistan, the only British combat troops available there were SAS. So anything that British commanders wanted to do had to be done by SAS. In effect, the SAS were victims of their own success in being able to get anywhere, anytime, in a hurry.
I posted about my own brief encounter with the SAS on the old blog.
